Why No One Can Agree on Fitness Tips
You don’t have to look far to find conflicting advice on what to do in the gym. Some people will tell you not to do certain exercises at all; others will discuss little things like how straight your elbows should be at the top of your abs. Facing diametrically opposed points of view can be frustrating when you’re just looking for expert advice, but there is often a reason for such wild differences of opinion – provided you look deep enough.
Before we get into the reasons for these differences, it’s worth noting that there are a number of things that are true for the entire fitness world. You can rely on them, and when you get confused, come back to them:
- Strength training is important and should be considered relatively hard .
- Cardio is important too, and we should all be getting 150+ minutes a week from it .
- Eating enough protein will help you achieve any body composition goal (gain muscle mass, lose weight, stay fit at the same weight).
- No reasonable exercise is anticipated trauma .
- Consistency always trumps perfection .
Now, for some reason, things are often confusing …
There are different fitness cultures and different ways of doing business
Are you a bodybuilder? Powerlifter? Weightlifter? Crossfitter? Runner? Cyclist? Do you like kettlebells? If you do not have a clear answer to this question, then you are in the better side in order to get confused.
This is because all of these groups act in slightly different ways, both because of their different goals and because of their different history. For example, weightlifters will often squat as low as comfortable because they will be pushed into that position during competition lifts; Powerlifters usually squat until their thighs are nearly parallel to the ground because that’s how they are judged in competition and want to use their energy as efficiently as possible.
This inconsistency occurs almost everywhere you see conflicting advice, or whenever adherents of one training style look down on the advice of another. Military fitness tests require strict pull-ups; CrossFit competitions encourage fast pull-ups, for which lifts or butterfly movements are most appropriate. Each group does what works best for them.
So if you just want to do “pull-ups” or “squats,” it’s no wonder you don’t know how to do it. There are many correct answers! One way to cope is to choose a discipline that will help you solve the problem. If you think you might ever want to compete in powerlifting – or even if you just think powerlifters are cooler (you are wrong, but that’s a hypothesis), whenever you get confused, ask a powerlifter for advice or explore what powerlifting is. said by a respected powerlifting coach.
Another strategy is to simply take a Zen-like approach and recognize that every answer is an answer, and no one should be the answer.
Some things are technically correct but not useful.
We’ve already established that the basics of fitness are simple. But people still love to talk about fitness and need to be told other than “consistency is good” and “hey guys, let’s all lift the heavy ones.”
Therefore, a lot of attention is paid to the smallest details. Several studies have shown that strength gains are slightly lower in people who do more cardio, which is why some lifters refuse to do any cardio. (Incidentally, this is the wrong answer to this information; the “cardio kills your achievement” effect is more myth than fact .)
This is the same attitude that makes people fixate on which supplements are best without first gaining very basic nutritional knowledge, or asking if certain curl variations are more effective instead of going to the gym and actually do a few bends.
The bottom line is that you can and will face endless arguments about whether something is true or not, or whether X is better than Y, when it really doesn’t matter . If in doubt, return to the basics above.
People will spread the message they want to believe in
Some of the confusion is the result of sheer misinformation, like those old chestnuts we found repetitive on TikTok . You can’t spot fat reduction (like reducing belly fat with abdominal exercises) and you never could, but an alarming number of people happily say or imply that you can because that’s what their audience likes. hear. This, and sometimes they themselves want to believe it.
Here at Lifehacker, we try to destroy these myths whenever possible. But when you’re alone, you better stick to the basics. If someone offers a shortcut that makes the fundamentals obsolete, it’s a guarantee that whatever they say is too good to be true.